Better "Soft Quorum" Rule

...there is a worry, which has been pointed out by score-voting critics.
It is this:

"Unknown lunatic wins" nightmare:
Suppose some crazy candidate whom almost nobody has ever heard of, runs for election.
He convinces a small core group of fanatics to score him maximum. Ever other voter honestly
gives him "no opinion" and hence his average score is very high, and he unexpectedly
wins the election.

Is this nightmare realistic?
No. The reason it is not realistic is that all those people who have complained to us about this
possible nightmare, will vote min-score for unknown candidates to protect themselves from
the nightmare. And it is an experimental fact, which we have seen in action many times, that
a large fraction of score voters give unknown-to-them candidates minimum score.
It is true that many score voters also give unknown-to-them candidates "no opinion." But
in our extensive poll/test experiences
with real voters, the former behavior is actually substantially more
common (e.g. in one study we found it was 1.7× more common).

Statistical trends like that actually become massively reliable when the number of voters
becomes large.
In other words: the very fear of this nightmare automatically stops it from happening.

But some people are unconvinced by all that. They still twist and turn in bed shuddering
with fear of this nightmare, and want even more protection. Hence for them we offer...

The latest plan:
is a score-voting system in which each candidate gets some pre-agreed number T of
artificial "zero" (or other agreed fixed) scores before voting begins (e.g. 1000 zeros each).
Then the highest average score wins.
("NO OPINION" votes do not affect averages, as usual.)

The optimum value of T presumably roughly equals the size of the
largest set of fanatics anybody can organize to support them while at the
same time staying unknown to (or at least
inspiring no interest from) the rest of society.
(It is very hard
both to organize your fanatics and stay unknown at the same time, so I
do not expect this number will be very large, percentagewise.)

The point is that, if this is done, it becomes almost impossible
to win versus well-known opponents
if you have a small number of supporters even if 100% of the rest
of society votes "no opinion" about you. (This "soft quorum" method seems superior in
various ways to older quorum rules
1,
2, which we now deprecate.)

So those who worry about that nightmare
scenario now can relax.

But on the other hand, if T were made too large
then that also would be bad because it would prevent
excellent-quality candidates from winning just because
they were insufficiently well known.
For example, in the 2008 Time Magazine
"person of year" contest (which was conducted via score voting)
B.Obama was extremely well
known but as of that date had actually done very little.
He was winning Time's poll by a small margin.
The second-placer was a comparatively extremely-unknown scientist,
Douglas Melton, who found a breakthrough which may eventually cure
diabetes. If so, he certainly is a great benefactor of humanity and
deserves to win or at least place high. But if the number of artificial
"zeros" were too many, then Melton
would be unable to compete with Obama even if his quality was reckoned higher by
everybody who knew both.

So it is bad to set the "quorum" level too high. But it also is bad to set T too low,
because that would cause too many people to be too-scared about the "unknown
fanatic wins" scenario. We need to employ the level that yields the
optimum tradeoff.